Brouhaha

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Each of the principal characters reaches an accommodation with the real world, and a kind of elegiac acceptance of it. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. This has the bones of a cracking literary thriller with heavyweight crime story credentials, but it also has a surreal quality to it in the way the very darkest kind of humour ties everything together. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Another person near obsessed with Sandra’s disappearance is Kevin Healy, the Garda who was in charge of her case at the time.

The wonderful town that is Tullyanna, fictional but I would imagine to have been made up of maybe one or two real places. This was a wee bit heavy going until I managed to settle in to the author's writing style, which did take a bit longer than usual for me. Philip, a drifter and jack of all trades, is mourning the suicide of his childhood friend, Dove Connolly. It is a place he has been trying to avoid for the past ten years, after events got out of hand following the disappearance of his friend Sandra Mohan, who was Dove's on-off girlfriend. As for the group of boyhood friends surrounding Philip, the like of them can be seen hanging around on street corners in any town, anywhere in the world.I got about 140 pages into it, and then jumped to the last 5 chapters to find out what happened, but all in all just felt disappointing and kind of lack the oomph or the excitement for me to really get stuck in. Others will enjoy like it just as it is, with all the wisdom, sidebars and humour that O'Hanlon is noted for. Philip quickly discovers there are others in the town still looking into Sandra’s disappearance, including Kevin Healy a local Garda detective, who was retired on medical grounds and a journalist Joanne McCollum, who’s written wild speculatory pieces on the case.

In so doing, poor Dove had spread panic amongst the townspeople, raising all sorts of ugly questions, reviving all sorts of rumours, and inviting all sorts of unwelcome attention upon them. Dove’s best friend Philip Sharkey, who was with him on the day, left town soon after and stayed away.Having the gift of the gab, also allows the country to produce is fair share of comedians, without the ability to prattle on for ages in front of an audience, you’d be like a certain French clown. The solution to Sandra’s disappearance too is rather dark and disturbing, and left me feeling unsettled. No doubt O’Hanlon’s publisher would like it to be compared to Paul Murray and Colin Bateman, but Brouhaha would probably never have been published were it not for O’Hanlon’s status.

Ten years previous to this, Dove’s girlfriend Sandra Mohan (only 16 at the time) had gone missing and was never seen again, and an article by a journalist Joanne McCollum pointed to him as responsible, ruining his reputation. Interesting characters though and felt like a book written by a "real" author, and not just a celebrity cross over. The storyline moves between the events around the unsolved disappearance of teenager Sandra Mohan in 1994, and the impact of Sharkey, Kevin and Joanne's efforts to finally get to the truth following Dove's death - when all Tullyanna's dirty little secrets come spilling out. Now his best friend Philip is home asking awkward questions about Dave's death, about the strange graphic novel he left behind, and, most of all, about Sandra - missing now for over a decade, whereabouts unknown.I have been a fan of Ardal O’Hanlon since watching him as a kid in Father Ted, Death on paradise etc.